1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of ecommerce and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for inferring intent of Web visitors and generating leads based on the inferred intent other information about visitors and Website visits.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of ecommerce, it is desired that information about visitors to ecommerce pages be made available to site owners for the purpose of leveraging information captured about the visitors to the site to increase sales revenue of the site through proactive contact with those potential customers.
It is known that servers track Website visitors by recording their browser behavior at the site especially the sequence of URLs clicked on by the visitor during site navigation. Information about each visitor to the site is collected where information is available and recorded so that owners/operators of the site may utilize the information in an attempt to reach potential new customers who have visited the site but who had not become customers of the site. Tracking cookies are one method that is used to track browser navigation and search behavior of online visitors in an attempt to determine what the visitors are interested in.
In many cases custom advertisements in the form of banner ads and other types of advertising are pushed to visitor's Internet appliances where the visitors exhibited some definitive pattern in Web navigation and/or some pattern in searching the Internet. An advertiser seeks to deliver advertising that might be relevant to what the visitor may be interested in at the time. Gathering data about online activity of persons is often used in addition to profile data, survey data, etc. to attempt to determine what interest patterns exist for the user and therefore what products and services that user might be interested in.
Much of this kind of visitor monitoring and data gathering is semi-automated at best and much manual work is required in order to determine interests of a user to any degree of authenticity. Moreover, much visitor behavior online may not be simpatico to visitor behaviors offline such as store purchase histories, hobbies, work patterns, spending patterns, and general demographics. Another challenge is categorizing visitors into one or more groups having the same general product or service interest that would serve as a potential marketing base for a proactive campaign to offer products or services to those visitors.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system for monitoring and recording visitor behavior and for inferring intent of visitors to a Web interactive or Website in a manner that correlates the inference data with other data gathered using more traditional techniques that would result in better granularity of visitor intent at the site and in general would provide more robust information for group categorization and generation of better qualified leads.